People who need to get food from food pantries do not always have reliable personal vehicles. Are they able to get to the food pantries by using public transportation?

Can people get to food pantries by bus?

We visualized locations of food pantries and bus stops in the four counties Durham, Johnston, Orange, and Wake. Our analysis shows which pantries have bus stops within a mile (a ‘reasonable’ walking distance) of their location.

Limitations: The distance between pantries and bus stops is calculated as great circle distance. Obstacles which might increase the actual walking distance (such as rivers, buildings, walls) were not taken into account. We emphasize that this analysis does not ask whether there are bus routes from low income areas to food pantries. This analysis only addresses whether it is possible for someone somewhere to travel to pantries in Wake, Durham, Orange and Johnston counties by bus. Another limitation is that we are missing bus schedules (to determine which days/hours a bus operates) and hours for food pantries.

Visualization

The locations of food pantries and bus stops (GoTriangle, GoRaleigh, GoDurham, Chapel Hill Transit, NC State University Wolfline, Duke University Transit) in the four counties Durham, Johnston, Orange, and Wake:
Note that Johnston County does not have bus lines except for limited use by handicapped and elderly people. Including Johnston County there are 169 food pantries, excluding Johnston County there are 136 pantries.

How close is each pantry to the nearest bus stop?

Johnston county has the most room for improvement (since there is no public transportation), but lower cost improvement might be in Wake county where there are existing bus lines that could be extended or modified.

86 pantries in the four counties are served by buses (defined as having a bus stop within a 1 mile radius). We found that the vast majorities of food pantries in Durham County (95%) were served by at least one bus stop within a mile, whereas Orange County only had 67% of pantries served by bus stops and in Wake County a mere 49% of pantries were served by bus stops. Johnston County does not have a bus line, so none of its pantries were served by bus stops. These insights are visualized below.

Limitations:
We have merely looked at pantries that have bus stops within less than a mile. Future analyses should address whether there are bus routes that travel from low income neighborhoods (e.g., by zip codes identified as low income) to the food pantries in a reasonable amount of time (e.g., less than 1 hour).


Sources

TransLoc
NC 2-1-1 Community Resource Database

Files used for the analysis (downloaded Oct/Nov 2015):
A list of food pantries pantries.csv
A list of bus stops bustops.rds
A list of bus transportation agencies local_agencies.csv

Contributors

Monika Sanghi
Kip Sutter
Clara Sutter
Rex Dwyer
Alice Broadhead
Lucia Gjeltema